Srt subtitles sometimes contain style formatting tags.
Unfortunately, many video players don't support formatting and display them as plain text.
Examples of formatting are italic <i></i>, bold <b></b> or colored text <font></font>.
This tool strips all html formatting that is contained in angle brackets.
It can also remove song text and lyrics.
The cleaner also converts the file to UTF-8 text encoding, the cues will be sorted based on their start time, and duplicate or empty cues will be removed.
The strip text between parentheses option can be used to turn subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH subtitles) into regular subtitles.
This option will remove any SDH text (which should be between parentheses), leaving only dialogue cues.
If the SDH text is contained in different kinds of brackets, or between asterisks (*), you can use one of the other options to strip them too.
The strip speaker labels option is also useful when working with SDH subtitles.
It removes the name of the speaker from the beginning of lines.
In a dialogue cue, any uppercase text before a colon (:) is considered a speaker label.
For example, a cue containing the text "GEORGE: The summer of George!" will be changed to "-The summer of George!".
Some subtitles have some or all of their text in UPPERCASE.
The "fix uppercase text" option will change all cues in your subtitle file that have fully uppercase text to lowercase.
Only cues that are fully uppercase will be changed, any cues that aren't in uppercase will be left unchanged.
This option has one caveat: the tool isn't smart enough to recognize proper nouns that should start with a capital letter.
Proper nouns, such as names of people, cities and companies will also be changed to lowercase.
This tool also removes all effects that are leftover when converting a subtitle format to srt. Most notably, it removes formatting effects contained in curly brackets (eg: {\f4}) which come from substation alpha subtitles.